Moving on to Navasana at Eddie's!!!

As I might have mentioned, I am a pose or two behind at Eddie Stern's Patanjali Yoga Shala. Sarah is quite conservative about moving me forward. I have bound in Marichi C and D with her help, and then she usually stops me. Today, the ease with which I bound in C and the improvement with which I bound in D, perhaps, led her to move me on to Navasana. I ended up doing it 10 times because I knew she wasn't going to let me go any further. And she didn't...which was fine. I had probably my most energetic and efficient Primary Series practice to date today, and why ruin it by bogging me down with another "new" pose with a complicated vinyasa in and out?

I taught the Led Primary Series at New York Yoga today, and it went great. Unfortunately, the program at New York Yoga has taken quite a dive, probably due partially to the fact that it's the summer, and probably due partially to the fact that Orly, though a wonderful teacher, was not able to teach the Primary Series from the heart. I just don't think she believed in the system for the New York Yoga clientele. She said to me that she believed that a system that repeated the same poses each time would not be right for a group of people not practicing it five or six days a week. Right or wrong, I personally believe that the only way to become committed to a daily practice is to dive into it and experience it. And so, I am teaching a very traditional sequence, with sanskrit chanting, sanskrit counting and NO offerred modifications. In my opinion, the only way to learn any given pose is to keep trying to do it. If you try to do Marichichi A, for example, and you can't bind, then keep working to get your ribcage in front of your knee. But to do a totally different pose as a modification...why bother? To me, it's a waste of time.

This is the way Bikram is as well. "If you can't do it, do it anyway" was the mantra. And though Bikram is a bit unintellectual for me, Mr. Choudhary has a point: you have to keep DOING it to become proficient at it. Doing modifications is like speed walking to train for a running race. Instead, just go out and run. Just do the poses. They will come.

YC